As time has passed, more and more websites and services have adopted ways to try and verify their user’s age online. Even discord servers nowadays are littered by those, which would be fine if they worked and were safe, but the reality is: they don’t work.
Kids and teenagers, which those are supposed to “protect”, have always been able to circumvent those systems since the dawn of the internet, while the ones who don’t work around it end inevitably having their data leaked by hackers.
If you are lazy, there’s a nice video on the topic at the end of this article.
Kids always get around it
Those systems have never worked.
Back when the internet was new, kids would just input a random birth date and see the content anyway. Then they started asking for things such as IDs or Credit Cards, and people would either send fake online generated information or any random picture as those never really got verified.
Nowadays kids can use videogame screenshots, like from Death Stranding, to bypass ID verification. And in the future they will find other ways.
It is simply not possible to verify someone’s age online with 100% accuracy. There will always be ways to get around it, and kids/teenagers will always find and use them to access what they want.
Dangerous for Everyone
I know nobody cares about privacy anymore, It’s a lost battle ever since google chrome became the web’s default browser, but lack of privacy means lack of safety. The more we give every company our personal information, the more danger we are in.
The type of data companies collect to verify your age is called “biometric data”, which basically means information useed to identify a person. This kind of information is VERY dangerous to share. ANYONE with this information on you can act like they are you.
With your biometrics people can:
- Send you/your family Scams
- Do Identity Theft
- Open bank accounts in your name online
- Access illegal contents using your information
- Create deepfakes(even including PORN using your face)
- Steal your online accounts(by “recovering passwords” with your information through support channels)
- Blackmail you
And these are just a few examples I could think within minutes. And no matter the company, eventually there will be a breach with your information in it.
What to do
Protest.
I know it has gone a little out of fashion, as people are getting more and more numb to the terrible news we see everywhere every single day, but the only way to get rid of these is by protesting. This is how you show your dissatisfaction.
You may be asking “Why protest? These are companies/people doing it, not the government” but the reason why more and more companies are asking for every bit of your information is because governments are making them.
Recently, for example, the U.K. has passed possibly the dumbest piece of law ever: The Online Safety Act. This law is now inspiring other countries to do the same. And it doesn’t even protect kids, as it mostly forces big websites to get a bunch of data on you “to ensure you are not a child”, while any website with less than 34 million visitors doesn’t need to do anything.
This basically means that facebook, google, youtube, twitter, reddit, etc all are legally required to collect and store EVEN MORE of your data. And as we have seen before, this WILL be sold for extra profit. It WILL LEAK. And it WILL affect YOU.
So protest. If your government even starts TALKING about such laws, protest until they drop it.
Child safety is important, but more data collection won’t improve it.
Now for a funny video on the topic, which I personally agree with a lot:
